STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

Apart from the issues you and your commenters rightly flagged in your post on the Olympic games, it seems to me that another problem is that so few these days view competitive sporting spectacles through the lens of perspective and proportion – which is how properly-formed and thinking adults naturally view everything.

Too many now look care about sporting displays for the superficial appeal: valuing the mere mechanical exercise of showing who can run the fastest or  jump the highest or hit a fuzzy ball most accurately. To do so is to miss the true point and value of sport entirely.

Unless the mechanical exercise displays some higher transcendental value then sports are nothing more than childrens’ games played by grown ups. There is a word that stands for the process of imbuing physical activity with transcendent value. I heard it a lot when growing up but it is now seldom heard, if at all: sportsmanship. (more…)

EVERYONE reading this now will be gone in a hundred years. So will their relatives and friends. All will vanish, including the greatest of accomplishments. The only permanent act that you or anyone else performs in this world is prayer, or those things that lead to prayer: AH, foolish man, why do you plan to live long when you are not sure of living even a day? How many have been deceived and suddenly snatched away! How often have you heard of persons being killed by drownings, by fatal falls from high places, of persons dying at meals, at play, in fires, by the sword, in pestilence, or at the hands of robbers! Death is the end of everyone and the life of man quickly passes away like a shadow. Who will remember you when you are dead? Who will pray for you? Do now, beloved, what you can, because you do not know when you will die, nor what your fate will be after death. Gather for yourself the riches of immortality while you have time. Think of nothing but your salvation. Care only for the things of God. Make friends for yourself now by honoring the saints of God, by imitating their actions, so that when you depart this life they may receive you into everlasting dwellings. Keep yourself as a stranger here on earth, a pilgrim whom its affairs do not concern at all. Keep your heart free…

DANIEL McADAMS writes:

The Olympic Games are these days just another opportunity for the warfare state to push pro-war propaganda.

Who can forget just four years ago, where the games at Sochi in Russia provided a venue for US commentators to relentlessly pummel everything and anything Russian. It was the pre-Russiagate psychological preparation of battlefield, brought to you by the military-industrial complex that pulls the strings of its mainstream media puppets.

This year the target is still Russia, whose athletes innocent of doping are still forbidden from wearing their country’s colors or being identified as citizens of that country. It seems Orwellian.

But the big target of the warmongers in this year’s Olympics is North Korea. Neocons — and even many “non-interventionists,” “libertarians,” and even “progressives” — have worked themselves into a frenzy simply because the North Korean leader has sent his sister down to “turn on a charm offensive” with the South in hopes of an ultimate reunification of the long-divided country. How DARE Kim’s sister be allowed to observe at the games! “The North Koreans are killing millions of their own people, they need regime change!” (more…)

KYLE writes:

The National Portrait Gallery unveiled two new additions to the presidential art collection today: Barack and Michelle Obama. The new portraits confirm again that this nation made a grave error in assuming this man would be a “racial healer.”

The pictures have been described as “breaking tradition” with presidential portraits of the past. The primary portrait shows a seated Barack Obama, arms folded in lap, enveloped by a wall of greenery and flowers blooming around him. Michelle’s portrait, equally garish, shows her seated in a long, flowing dress with black and gray triangular designs. The commissioned artists, both African American, have portfolios that exclusively feature African Americans. Both artists have been candid with how much race influences their style and choice of subject matter. Surprise–their work is critical of white people.

Kehinde Wiley, an artist from Los Angeles and painter of Barack’s portrait, has painted images of black women holding the severed head of white women on at least two occasions. [Ed. — He is shown above making a Masonic hand sign — too obviously.] (more…)

IT IS WRONG and immoral to watch the Olympic Games currently taking place in Peongchang, South Korea. When on our own, we should avoid them like the plague. We should avoid them even though the participants often make great sacrifices and exhibit true athletic excellence that may be thrilling and inspiring to witness. The athletes are not to blame for the decadent, increasingly occult atmosphere of Olympic competition. It is wrong to watch the games for the following reasons:

** The athletes dress and sometimes perform with extreme immodesty, whether they are wearing form-fitting skiing outfits or skimpy skating costumes. This immodesty is especially degrading of the women athletes.

** The training of Olympic athletes has reached an inhuman level of supposedly scientific fine-tuning that too often physically harms participants. There is a freakish quality to the Olympic ideal of athletic excellence.

** The Olympic ceremonies are riddled with occultism. (See more here.) The public, international worship of Satan is the end game.

** The games celebrate multiculturalism not true diversity, especially when it comes to Western nations.

** The intense commercialism of the games is contrary to the spirit of amateur athletics. The games are too much about money and promote indebtedness.

** The Olympics create ugly and expensive buildings (see here, here and here) that often become ghost towns afterward, such as the $51 billion Sochi Olympic park.

** The nations gathered to foster international harmony give no recognition to the only source of true peace and harmony: God and the Mystical Body of Christ on earth. The Olympics are a manifestation of One World-ism, which fosters apocalyptic conflict. (more…)

  "Paganism regards woman as a slave, and this is the result of failure to appreciate every human being as a distinct, living personality. When personality is overlooked, a slave ceases to be an intelligent being, and becomes merely a thing, or at best a domestic animal. Where woman is regarded as the slave of her husband, polygamy results, for he may have several slaves and consequently several wives. ** The number of his wives and slaves is as unimportant as the number of his domestic animals and of the utensils employed in his business. A further result of this theory is that marriage ceases to be permanent. A worn-out utensil is thrown away, a worthless slave is got rid of in one way or another, and so is an animal which is no longer required. If the wife is nothing but a chattel belonging to the husband, he can keep her or dispose of her as he chooses. "Someone may feel inclined to exclaim that all this has nothing to do with us; no wife is now her husband's slave. Of course she is not legally, but is she not sometimes practically a slave? Do not men allow their wives to toil in order to support the family? Do none amongst us heap upon women cares and burdens such as the men alone are qualified to bear? Men are very apt to relieve themselves of their troubles; and women…

THIS anecdote appeared this week in the Catholic Tradition Newsletter and is reprinted with the kind permission of its author, the Rev. Fr. Courtney Edward Krier:

ON a flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles this past week there was a woman who asked if she could take the seat next to me. Being on a plane and without observing who it was in particular, I replied out of courtesy that it was fine. After she had settled in she made it known that she was a porn star and comic stand-up and wanted to use the opportunity to sit next to a priest to get material for one of her next gigs. Being that now I had little choice but to be patient—she didn’t seem to be immodestly attired besides pants—I went on with my work and prayers. This woman soon began to extol her work in the sex industry and her rise in the stand-up comedy stage with a male neighbor and, further, how she wanted to make her lifestyle as acceptable in society as the LGBT had made theirs. She explained that when she was a teenager she left her mother because her mother was too strict and religious. She went to live with her father, a Freemason she said, who always approved of whatever she wanted to do. She also expressed she was disappointed that her mother still refused to approve of her lifestyle and even now would refuse to accept whatever she sent because it was gotten as a result of her immoral trade. (more…)

  "IMMACULATE Heart of Mary, perfect Model of Sanctity, take my soul and mold it according to thy sublime perfections. Purify my heart and set it free from every obstacle to holiness, so that detached from self and the pleasures of sense, thou mayest adorn it with the virtues and perfection of thy own Immaculate Heart. Then, lead my soul to that divine intimacy which alone can satisfy the immense capacity for love and union with which God has created the human heart. From thee, I confidently hope for this grace of holiness, and I entrust my eternal destiny to thy Immaculate Heart."

MICHAEL RUSKIN writes:

Feminists are now finding out that self-hatred is a dead end street and having driven down it at full speed they are now hitting the wall. The wall is called reality. There is no happy ending for those who follow ideologies, it’s impossible because one can never win a clash with truth. If you are taught to hate yourself (even without realising it), your sex and your race and choose to believe that’s what you must do, then it’s certain you have no future and can’t offer one either.

Communism and Nazism should be a lesson to those addicted to political Feminism, ideologies always end in the destruction of the believers, in this case themselves. To accept certainty about who you are and reject the confines of political correctness is liberating. However, it will take courage for any of them to draw back from the precipice, to love instead of lie, to humble themselves,  but it can be done. For such we must pray.  However, no mercy should be shown towards ideologies, mercy is shown towards persons not political doctrines. Feminism has past its use by date and is well into the nihilistic stage. The feminists of the 60’s taught white women to hate their unborn, to dismiss them as something alien instead of life of their life and blood of their blood. The unborn were to be viewed as something hindering self-fulfillment. Where has that ended up for them? It has led from dehumanising their unborn into dehumanising themselves. One cannot deny natural absolutes without suffering harm.

During a charade, Comedienne Sarah Silverman said that conscience clause law that prevented aborted fetuses from being used in manufactured food products would be a reason for her to “eat an aborted fetus.” (more…)

IN RECOGNITION of Black History Month, I offer two poems by an African American: Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), a woman sold into slavery in West Africa who ended up as a domestic maid in Boston. I had never heard of Wheatley until recently. She once expressed the opinion that she was glad to have been enslaved because through it she was introduced to Christianity. Yikes!!

ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic dye.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Wheatley’s masters in Boston, John and Susanna Wheatley, devoted considerable effort to educating her and eventually emancipated her.

“By the age of 12, Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics and difficult passages from the Bible. At the age of 14, she wrote her first poem, “To the University of Cambridge, in New England.” Recognizing her literary ability, the Wheatley family supported Phillis’s education and left the household labor to their other domestic slaves. The Wheatleys often showed off her abilities to friends and family. Strongly influenced by her studies of the works of Alexander Pope, John Milton, Homer, Horace and Virgil, Phillis Wheatley began to write poetry.” Source

My second poem by Wheatley is also at odds with American mainstream history. It expresses Loyalist sentiments toward King George III and was written after he repealed the Stamp Act. (Tens of thousands of Loyalists fled America after the close of the Revolutionary War.) The monarchist view and touching loyalty of the poem are nothing less than political heresy — another possible reason why Wheatley is little known.

TO THE KING’S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY

YOUR subjects hope, dread Sire—
The crown upon your brows may flourish long,
And that your arm may in your God be strong!
O may your sceptre num’rous nations sway,
And all with love and readiness obey!
But how shall we the British King reward!
Rule thou in peace, our father, and our lord!
Midst the remembrance of thy favours past,
The meanest peasants most admire the last.
May George, belov’d by all the nations round,
Live with heav’ns choicest constant blessings crown’d!
Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,
And from his head let ev’ry evil fly!
And may each clime with equal gladness see
A monarch’s smile can set his subjects free!

And to think, Wheatley never even went to school, she never spent 12 long years of her life in a cinderblock prison known as public school, and yet she was able to produce these fine verses.

Wheatley tragically died at the age of 31 after marrying a man who was imprisoned for debt. She never got tenure as a black history professor or made much money from her poems. After she was freed, she still worked as a servant. She faced the lot of most poets: poverty laced with idealism. May her memory live in the hearts of Americans! (more…)

LIKE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, the movie The Shape of Water — playing now at a theater near you — romanticizes sexual love between a human being and an animal. In this case, a deaf woman who works as a janitor falls in love with a creature taken from a South American river and kept in the government lab where she is working. Their affair is eventually consummated.

The Sexual Revolution finds new territory to conquer. (more…)

"As it was during the days of poor old President Herbert Hoover, the stock jobbers of the New World Order .... are demonstrating that they can pop a bubble just as easily as they can inflate one. The fact that last Friday's crash coincided with the release of "the memo" ™ exposing the whole "Russian collusion" ™ fiasco as a criminal conspiracy against Trump is, as they say in poker parlance, an obvious "tell" of what is taking place here. And the "666" points lost on Friday (the 33rd day of the year) was an especially twisted Satanic touch."  -- The Anti-New York Times Read about the occult symbolism behind last week's stock market crash here.

  FEMINIST and lawyer Catherine MacKinnon has worked tirelessly to undermine principles of legal justice, including the presumption of innocence, in the name of righting wrongs against women. Scott H. Greenfield writes: She’s proven remarkably capable of asserting her narrative as reality, inexplicably managing to simultaneously promote two facially inconsistent beliefs without the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance. Women are strong and smart. They can be and do anything. Women are weak and afraid. They need special protections and lesser demands of the law. To note this inconsistency isn’t to be fair, to believe in equality, but to be a tool of the Patriarchy, and thus attacked with ad hominems under the guise of having a discussion. And it was the law that failed women, which is why any comparison of accuser and accused was a false equivalency. He sums up: It’s taken MacKinnon a lifetime to undermine the legal system, to create a narrative that eliminates all reason, all principle, from the rage of the mob. She was the high priestess of a religion, and she managed to get people to believe in her god. Now the god demands sacrifices.

AMERICA has a great folk music tradition (see an example below) — and thousands of musicians out there still perform it and are starved for attention. America has outstanding college choirs, high school choirs, children’s choirs which play inspiring and happy music that comes from the soul of our country. Marching bands can still get crowds going with the music of celebration for a crowd.

Then why at a major sporting event such as the Super Bowl do we get rock spectacles with megastars who already get tons of visibility?

The answer is, the rock spectacle is a form of political, economic and spiritual control, like feeding drugs to people you want to buy your products, do your bidding and sell their souls. That’s not to say that many millions of people don’t enjoy it; they clearly do, just as drug users like the substances that get them high. Rock is the music of revolution and desire. In the crowd at a mass spectacle, the nation and individual vanish in an ocean of throbbing, tribalistic percussion, light wizardry and unleashed desire.

It’s control through the unleashing of desire. Those enslaved to passion cannot easily act for themselves or think clearly. E. Michael Jones, in his book Dionysos Rising: The Birth of the Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music, wrote:

Inordinate desires are constantly interfering with the harmonious ordering of parts essential to music. When reason does not recognize and respect degree, there is no harmony in nature. Reason is replaced by will as the guide to human action, and chaos on the personal, political, and cosmic levels follows as a result. Inordinate desires held and nurtured by the individual will spread to the body politic and bring ruin. In each instance, the times “will be out of tune.”

Order lacking in one area will make itself felt in another. Because political harmony will begin in the well-ordered soul and radiate out to encompass the body politic, music has an especially important part to play in society. Music acts directly on the soul. Disordered music leads to disordered lives, which lead to disorder in the state. Plato, sensing the importance of order in the soul, banned the playing of certain modes in his ideal republic in the certainty that the disorder this music into the soul would soon put the state in jeopardy of insurrection.

In America, rock spectacles are not so much about insurrection by the people as insurrection against the people. 

“The rock revolution,” wrote Fr. Jean-Paul Régimbal, “makes young people lose their sense of belonging to this group or that country. Instead, they have the feeling of being citizens of a world without faith, law or obligations to others …”

Rock always seems new, but it’s actually as old as the Fall of Man.

(more…)